As library people, we think about making our information and materials available to our communities every day.  Part of that work is a responsibility to think about making it all available to people in the future. The Web is like a living thing – it changes, grows, and pieces can die; thinking about preserving information needs to take into account those potential changes.

The Digital Preservation Network is already thinking about this, and helping to establish a safe system as well as best practices for you to preserve information. Their audience is academic environments, potentially producing unique material that may not be available elsewhere. As we have seen in the recent news, turbulent political changes can cause information to disappear or to be suppressed; the DPN can help libraries to preserve and share their information. Likewise, natural disasters can destroy buildings holding both paper materials and servers holding backups, ransomware attacks can happen, institutions can change or fall, and just bad luck and bad planning can destroy years of work. Having information available through something like the DPN will help to ensure its survival.

“The Digital Preservation Network (DPN) is the only large-scale digital preservation service that is built to last beyond the life spans of individuals, technological systems, and organizations. DPN provides members of the academy and their successors with assurance that future access to their scholarly resources will be available in the event of disruptive change in administrative or physical institutional environments. By establishing a redundant and varied technical and legal infrastructure the survival, ownership and management of preserved digital content in the future is assured for DPN members.”

You probably read in the news about the Internet Archive moving copies of all their material to Canada after the most recent US Presidential election. “The history of libraries is one of loss.  The Library of Alexandria is best known for its disappearance…So this year, we have set a new goal: to create a copy of Internet Archive’s digital collections in another country. We are building the Internet Archive of Canada because, to quote our friends at LOCKSS, “lots of copies keep stuff safe.””

If you have ever needed a website that might be down, or that has disappeared, then the Internet Archive is  an amazing resource! “Founded in 1996, the Internet Archive has an historical web collection (the Wayback Machine) of over 150 billion web pages, about 240,000 movies, over 500,000 audio items (including over 70,000 live concerts), over 1,800,000 texts, 1600 education items, and over 30,000 software items. And we’re growing bigger every day!”

The Wayback Machine is their most popular service, and a great resource for you and for your patrons! “Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures. Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive’s mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars. The Archive collaborates with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian.”

Datarefuge is another online information repository. “DataRefuge is a public, collaborative project designed to address the following concerns about federal climate and environmental data:

• What are the best ways to safeguard data?
• How do federal agencies play crucial roles in data collection, management, and distribution?
• How do government priorities impact data’s accessibility?
• Which projects and research fields depend on federal data?
• Which data sets are of value to research and local communities, and why?

DataRefuge is also an initiative committed to identifying, assessing, prioritizing, securing, and distributing reliable copies of federal climate and environmental data so that it remains available to researchers. Data collected as part of the #DataRefuge initiative will be stored in multiple, trusted locations to help ensure continued accessibility.

DataRefuge acknowledges–and in fact draws attention to–the fact that there are no guarantees of perfectly safe information. But there are ways that we can create safe and trustworthy copies. DataRefuge is thus also a project to develop the best methods, practices, and protocols to do so.”

DataRefuge offers a variety of ways for you to get involved in preserving reliable data, to be sure it is available for your patrons. Check out their videos to see how you and your community might get involved! Are you looking for an program to bring in students and other community members? Organize a DataRescue event! Let your community members, especially those with environmental data or interest, know about the resources available here!

Presidential Harvest is a repository for federal government websites, to preserve them at the end of an administration. “The Library of Congress, California Digital Library, University of North Texas Libraries, Internet Archive, George Washington University Libraries, Stanford University Libraries, and the U.S. Government Publishing Office have joined together for a collaborative project to preserve public United States Government web sites at the end of the current presidential administration ending January 20, 2017. This harvest is intended to document federal agencies’ presence on the World Wide Web during the transition of Presidential administrations and to enhance the existing collections of the partner institutions….Harvested content from previous End of Term Presidential Harvests is available at http://eotarchive.cdlib.org/.”

This project started July 6, 2016 and will conclude May 1, 2017. It involves not only getting copies of every with a .gov ending, but also using subject matter experts to add metadata information to make the content richer. In any administration change, the changes to websites and information can be substantial. This administration change has sparked some particular distress for information professionals and archivists of government information, who are working to preserve data. Tools like this repository can be valuable in helping scholars and others to have access to information that has changed or become unavailable from the original site. Your patrons who need access to information will need this kind of repository to ensure continuity of information and access.

Yet another site is Climate Mirror. “Climate Mirror is a distributed effort conducted by volunteers, in conjunction with efforts from institutions such as University of Pennsylvania, University of Toronto, and the Internet Archive, to mirror and back up U.S. Federal Climate Data…Our goal is to store climate change data redundantly in many locations around the world. To see our current mirrors, visit climate.daknob.net. We also have several torrents that you can use to both retrieve data and assist in maintaining them.”

The Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project is a more recent site, focused on saving climate data. “We backed up 40 terabytes of US government databases on climate change and the environment, saving it from the threat of a government run by climate change deniers. We raised about $20,000 on Kickstarter to pay for storage space and a server. ..”

In fact, these backups are worth having regardless of the current political situation. They should have been made long ago. But Trump’s choices for cabinet triggered a rush to get the job done before he takes office:

• Brady Dennis, Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump, Washington Post, 13 December 2016.

The Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project is part of this effort. So far our volunteers have backed up nearly 1 terabyte of data from NASA, NOAA, and other agencies. We’ll do a lot more. But we need some funds to pay for storage space and a server.

You can watch the nitty-gritty details of our progress here:

• Azimuth Backup Project: Issue Tracker.”

That final link is very interesting to see; you can watch the data backups being done in real time, seeing how recently each website and database is being backed up.

And finally, you can look at the Open Geoportal Community site created by Tufts University. “From 1/20-1/23 Tufts University and the Open Geoportal Community conducted a sizeable U.S. federal data harvest. We surveyed Tufts faculty to identify those geospatial data most critical their teaching and research. We then conducted a curated harvest to back up potentially at-risk federal, environmental and social justice geospatial data and associated tabular data.  Currently we are at around 20 TB of data backed up on Tufts Research Data Storage Network.  This is an ongoing effort as we are continuing to harvest data daily. Please contact Patrick.florance@tufts.edu if you would like to participate or learn more.”

As information professionals, collecting, sharing, and preserving information is at the heart of our mission. This is what we do, and our professional ethics require us to be both thoughtful and active in how we do this, because information is always important to the communities we serve!

ALA Code of Ethics

1. We provide the highest level of service to all library users through appropriate and usefully organized resources; equitable service policies; equitable access; and accurate, unbiased, and courteous responses to all requests.
2. We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources.
3. We protect each library user’s right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.
4. We respect intellectual property rights and advocate balance between the interests of information users and rights holders.
5. We treat co-workers and other colleagues with respect, fairness, and good faith, and advocate conditions of employment that safeguard the rights and welfare of all employees of our institutions.
6. We do not advance private interests at the expense of library users, colleagues, or our employing institutions.
7. We distinguish between our personal convictions and professional duties and do not allow our personal beliefs to interfere with fair representation of the aims of our institutions or the provision of access to their information resources.
8. We strive for excellence in the profession by maintaining and enhancing our own knowledge and skills, by encouraging the professional development of co-workers, and by fostering the aspirations of potential members of the profession.